Ahead of Trump's Inauguration, America Really Went For It in a 'Week for the Ages'

What is this? 1965?

In the days before Donald J. Trump Part II: This Time It’s Who the Hell Knows really kicks off, the United States put on a preemptive display for the ages.

Just this week, we had SpaceX launching its latest iteration of Starship (complete with a catch of the returned bottom part of the spacecraft and a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the top part), Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin flying its New Glenn rocket to orbit for the first time, SpaceX and Firefly sending a lunar lander to the Moon, Varda sending its second factory into orbit and Planet putting up more of its imaging satellites. And that was just space.¹

Anduril also opened its massive, new Arsenal-1 factory in Columbus, Ohio. The $1 billion manufacturing plant very much represents the future of the company and its ambition to pump out tens of thousands of autonomous aircraft and weapons systems.

I’m not a major flag-waver type. Overzealous patriotism, nationalism and all forms of groupthink make me nervous. That said, if the U.S. is going to spend money on things, it might as well do it in a competent fashion, and, if we hit the more than competent bar, then even better. So here’s why these things were a big deal for the U.S. and why you might want to feel some genuine pride for American ingenuity.

Blue Origin opened its doors in 2000. It had a couple false starts and then put a lot of attention toward its New Shepard vehicle for space tourism flights before really ramping up its efforts on the New Glenn rocket about a decade ago. Is 25 years a long time to bring these two programs to life? My god, yes. It’s NASA speed at best, and that’s not what you want to see from a commercial aerospace start-up.

To the Blue Origin team and Bezos’s credit, though, the company stuck with it and now appears poised for very big things. New Glenn is a large, reusable rocket meant to carry huge numbers of satellites into orbit. Blue Origin didn’t manage to stick the landing on the reuse technology during its first launch, but it did have a successful flight into space, and that pretty much never, ever happens with a first rocket.

New Glenn takes off during Americganza Week

SpaceX has been lapping the world with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets for the big stuff, and Rocket Lab has been lapping the world with its smaller Electron. Now, the US has another viable large, reusable rocket that will, no doubt, be backed with increasing investment. Not to mention – there are also a handful of other rocket players with medium-sized vehicles that are either launching or about to launch.

With this bevy of options for reaching space and Trump coming in, I very much suspect that the government will kill NASA’s Space Launch System. This is NASA’s enormous rocket that has cost more than $25 billion to build since its development began way back in 2011. (For a full assessment of the debacle that SLS is, head here.)

Killing the SLS could be just fine for NASA and even for its builders Boeing and Lockheed Martin. These organizations could refocus on whatever they do best and not have this particular national disgrace hanging over them anymore.

And the U.S. will be just fine too.

When SpaceX and Blue Origin started around 2000, the U.S. space program was in very bad shape. NASA was heading toward ending the Space Shuttle program, cutting off the U.S.’s ability to send humans into space. Boeing and Lockheed were charging obscene amounts of money to put satellites into orbit and had little to no innovative ideas on their roadmap. China’s space program was gearing up for a tremendous run.

Here in 2025, the U.S. is doing a decade’s worth of space stuff in a week. Should Europe ever want to catch up to the U.S. space program, it would take fifteen or twenty years and a monumental vibe shift. Russia’s space program is in dire straits due to corruption, the war, competition from SpaceX and the lack of commercial space start-ups. Only China can compete with the U.S. thanks to massive government investment, and it still trails the quantity and quality of rocket and satellite programs by a large margin.

The government has, of course, played a major role in the development of commercial space in the U.S. and should be applauded for what it got right. Rocket companies still depend on government contracts for much of their business. The U.S., though, has made the transition from government-first space to commercial-first space, and the pace of development that has resulted cannot be questioned. (I wrote a whole book about this and made a movie about it, so I’m biased but also not wrong.)

The last week confirmed that the U.S. is the envy of the world when it comes to space. Don’t take it for granted, patriots. This easily could not have happened. We could still be using Russian engines to power our rockets. And we could be reading about China’s great space successes with nervous envy.

Now to Anduril.

In 2000, Congress issued a mandate that called for one-third of the military’s deep strike aircraft to be unmanned by 2010. It also demanded that one-third of combat vehicles be unmanned by 2015.

Stop and read that again because it feels, even to me, like I’m making it up. But, no, there’s proof and everything.

We read about drone strikes all the time, and I think this gives a false impression of the U.S.’s autonomous warfighting abilities. Mark Cancian, a retired U.S. Marine Corps Colonel and now analyst with the Center for Strategic & International Studies, studies autonomous systems and had this perspective to share.

“The Marine Corps has talked about going 50 percent unmanned, and the Navy has talked about going to 40 percent,” Cancian says. “But, if you look at their programs, they’re down in the two percent to three percent range. So, they’re doing even worse than the Air Force, which has been stuck at six percent. The Air Force has about 300 attack drones, the Army is building up to 200, and the Marine Corps is at three.”

The story is even worse when it comes to ground combat vehicles. The major autonomous systems people will point to are supply vehicles that carry stuff and travel alongside soldiers, who still have to point the vehicles in the right direction by hand. Add in some bomb detecting robots, and you’re done.

When that mandate first came out, it was considered wildly ambitious. The 9-11 attacks then derailed focus away from a multi-pronged approach and placed an emphasis on things like the Predator and Reaper drones. The U.S. did invest in the DARPA Grand Challenge to spur the development of autonomous ground vehicles. The biggest win from that to date, though, has been the creation of self-driving cars with most of the top talent in the Grand Challenge competitions going off to work at places like Google and Tesla.

Away from hardware, other efforts to modernize the military have been SLS-level horrors. May you gently weep reading about the Army’s Future Combat Systems program. RIP.

Anduril has much work to do to shift the U.S. from the current state of affairs to a massive, quick-moving autonomous weapons powerhouse. But the creation of Arsenal-1 is certainly a step in that direction.

To date, Anduril has been making a wide variety of drones, surveillance systems, submarines and weapons at relatively modest-sized factories scattered around the country (and Australia). It does volumes in the thousands. Arsenal-1 is meant to take the company to the tens of thousands range with futuristic unmanned fighters and weapons the likes of which no other company has yet even thought of building.

Matt Grimm and Trae Stephens, two of Anduril’s co-founders, scoured the country looking for the best spot and the best deal for the new factory and settled on a location nestled next to Columbus, Ohio. The state appears . . . excited.

I’ve been following Anduril for some time now, and the rhetoric that surrounds it from traditional quarters reminds me of what I used to hear about SpaceX. Around 2012, people often told me SpaceX would destroy itself trying to make reusable rockets, and that they were pointless anyway. They also described the company as an amateur hour affair run by twenty-somethings who knew nothing about the realities of the industry. More acerbic critics would call SpaceX a joke.

While touring an Anduril factory last year in Southern California with some of the defense press, I heard one reporter remark that he could not believe there were actual vehicles being made. People in Washington had convinced him that Anduril was closer to Theranos than a Prime. The skepticism is understandable but also potentially dangerous for those dishing it out. SpaceX looked like a near impossible quest until it wasn’t. Folks at Boeing and Lockheed used to do much of the SpaceX undermining, and now they’re in the midst of trying to find a willing buyer for their shared rocket business. And, well, let’s all pour one out for this fella from Europe’s leading rocket maker, who didn’t dare to dream too big.

The point is that things sometimes move slowly and then they move very fast.

The U.S. is in desperate need of a company that can build things well. This story from 2023 in the New York Times received some attention but not as much as it should. The war in Ukraine has drained the U.S.’s supply of things like Stinger and Javelin missiles, and it turns out that we’ve kind of, sort of forgotten how to make more of them. The Times wrote:

In the first 10 months after Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting Washington to approve $33 billion in military aid so far, the United States sent Ukraine so many Stinger missiles from its own stocks that it would take 13 years’ worth of production at recent capacity levels to replace them. It has sent so many Javelin missiles that it would take five years at last year’s rates to replace them, according to Raytheon, the company that helps make the missile systems. [Emphasis and screams into the night are mine.]

When Raytheon is copping to things like that out loud, the situation has gotten very bad indeed.

At long last, the U.S. military has awakened to the production and modernization crisis on its hands. More programs of record – the things that actually pay for things to be made – have been fired up for modern weapons and software systems. Not enough for the U.S. military to seriously enter the post Windows 95 world, but still . . . more.

Of all the recent entrants to the defense field, Anduril is the best poised to propel the U.S. forward into a new military era. It has raised the most money, has the most ambition and has actual factories from which to produce things. Arsenal-1 has every chance of being Anduril’s equivalent of its Falcon 9 moment – that point in time when the past gave way to the future and traditions gave way to something faster, better and cheaper.

If all of this is your idea of making America great again, then you should be pleased. America had a hell of a week.

1. Also of note and very weird. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos seem to have made peace after years of space feuding. SpaceX and Blue Origin have fought over employees for ages, tossed lawsuits around, and Elon has mocked Bezos and Blue Origin several times. But they were both congratulating each other this week. I never even considered the possibility that Trump would somehow become a bonding element for these two billionaires.